Derek Ross

derekross@grownostr.org

The purple pill helps the orange pill go down.

Developer Relations at Soapbox.

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Imagine a future where $5 a year gets you access to blazingly fast, incredibly private, and feature rich Nostr interactions. Your apps are always updated. Your data syncs instantly. There's never spam or ads in your feed. A new social game comes out every week that you play with your friends and family. You can switch accounts whenever you want. You can't be banned or targeted.

We need significantly more zaps and more zappers!

I don’t know who is paid to promote Nostr, if anyone. This piece isn’t shade. But it’s exhausting to see innocent voices globally silenced on corporate platforms like X while Nostr exists. Last night, I wondered: how many more voices must be censored before the Nostr community gets uncomfortable and thinks creatively to reach the vulnerable?

Those spreading Nostr must be so passionate they’re willing to onboard others, which is time-consuming but rewarding for the right person. They’ll need to make Nostr and onboarding a core part of who they are. I see no issue with that level of dedication. I’ve been known to get that way myself at times. It’s fun for some folks.

Let's face it, re-uploading files to another server after they got removed from the original server is not the best user experience. Most people wouldn't have the backups of all the files, and/or the desire to do this work.

Just like Nostr itself, the Blossom protocol is dead-simple and it works!

Introduced by hzrd149 and Stu Bowman, Blossom blew my mind because it showed how we can solve complex problems easily by simply relying on the fact that Nostr exists. Having an open user directory, with the corresponding social graph and web of trust is an incredible building block.

In my view Nostr gets it right. Social media has been done to death by now, so I do not think it's worth the compromise to prioritize UX over decentralization. If that's the case we have not fixed anything. It's best to start with the purist idea and work backwards to UX, rather than start with UX and work backwards to decentralization. Many people have already written extensively about the decentralization of Bluesky, so I'll leave it at that.

I will keep this short. Bluesky is designed to be decentralized, but isn't. It reminds me of the communist idea about the "withering away of the state". The idea is that you're supposed to first sieze power and become the new state, and then under your rule the state will slowly disappear because you are doing all the right communist things. I think this is basically how Bluesky sees itself (whether they agree with the analogy or not).

One of the biggest hurdles of Bluesky, and by extension one of the greates appeals of Nostr, is in how easy it is to learn and build on.

Scaling Bitcoin so that it can enable hundreds of millions of people to become sovereign individuals is the most pressing challenge of our times. Our community must accept inevitable realities: not everybody will be able to afford on-chain transactions. The success of Bitcoin means that one day, during our lifetimes, a single Bitcoin translation will cost hundreds of dollars.

In just two days, 2024 will come to a close. And as I sit here reflecting and drinking my morning coffee, I can confidently say that this has been the best year I’ve had since 2018. The years leading up to this one, especially since returning to Berlin, were some of the most challenging of my life. They tested me in ways I never expected—moments when I wanted to give up, when I felt so lost I couldn’t see or feel anything anymore. I lost my smile, my positive side, my emotions, and even my sense of self. But this year was different. It felt like the sun finally broke through the clouds, and I could see light at the end of the tunnel. I laughed more. I loved more. I felt deeply again, like my emotions finally had room to breathe. For those who have read my book, you know I’ve faced my share of dark days, as many of us do. Some days were heavier than I could have imagined, and even now, there are moments when I question, “Why? Why this path? Why me?” But this reflection isn’t about the darkness. It’s about the gratitude. 2024 blessed me with so many moments of joy. I traveled, saw the world from new perspectives, and met extraordinary people who brought meaning and light into my life. These experiences reminded me that connection matters, that there’s beauty in the unfamiliar, and that we grow when we open ourselves up to it all—the good, the difficult, the unexpected. Now, back in Berlin, I feel a shift. The city feels cold again—not just in temperature, but in energy. Dark skies and gray streets mirror an unbalanced restlessness I can’t ignore. It’s not the coldness itself or the clouds; it’s the way this place feels as though it’s lost its spark. Smiles seem rare, warmth even rarer. And perhaps, that’s my sign. My time here feels like it’s coming to a close. But as this chapter winds down, I feel at peace. 2024 reminded me that life doesn’t stay stagnant. Even in the darkest times, the wheel turns. This year was proof that healing is possible, that joy can return, and that love—whether found in people, places, or moments—still exists. So, wherever this journey takes me next, I will carry this year with me. I’ll carry the laughter, the lessons, and the memories of those who reminded me that even in a messy, chaotic world, light and connection can thrive. And perhaps, just perhaps, this is only the beginning. The chapters ahead are unwritten, but I feel ready to meet them—with an open heart and gratitude for all that’s brought me here. Happy 2025 to all of YOU

Too bullish? Maybe I wasn't bullish enough? As is tradition, I will post my 2025 predictions tomorrow.

You may not be thinking about it, but if you believe in the promise of Nostr then we should expect to see Nostr feeds in many other contexts other than on a big super app in a phone -- we should see Nostr notes being referenced from and injected in unrelated webpages, unrelated apps, hardware devices, comment sections and so on. All these micro-clients will have to implement some complicated edit-fetching logic now?

Level 2 - Trust Your Bros: An Attested Check-in at an Attested Place. Your individual level of trust would be a function of the number of Attestations and how you weigh them within your own social graph.

@Arkinox has been leading the charge on the Places NIP, introducing Nostr notes (kind 37515) that represent physical locations. The draft is well-crafted, with bonus points for linking back to OSM (and other location repositories) via NIP-73 - External Content IDs (championed by @oscar of @fountain).

All identities that are not self-sovereign are, by definition, leased to you by a 3rd party. You rent your Facebook identity from Meta in exchange for your data. You rent your web domain from your DNS provider in exchange for your money.

The social features (check-ins, reviews, etc.) that Nostr unlocks for BTC Map are clear and exciting - all your silos are indeed broken - however, something fundamental has been bothering me for a while and I think it comes down to data ownership.

But it does mean that users will have to adapt their expectations to a network that partitions, re-configures, and evolves over time. Nostr is not a "worse" experience than legacy social media, but it is a version of social media that has itself been set free from the stagnant walled-garden model. Nostr is in many ways a living organism — we should be careful not to impose our expectations prematurely, leaving room to discover what this thing actually is, or can be.

This is "centralizing", but it's important to understand that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. As long as there are more than one or two large hubs, there is user choice. And as long as it's possible to run a new relay, there is always an escape hatch. Nostr, like bitcoin, has no hard dependency on the biggest player in the network.

Another, more technical assumption is that any given query can be fulfilled by few enough relays that a client can actually make all the connections needed, without running into resource limits. If you're trying to request content from 10,000 users across 1,000 relays, you're going to have a bad time. This was pointed out to me by Mazin of nostr.wine. He makes a good point, and it's definitely something to keep in mind. There are some mitigating factors though.

In early 2023, Mike Dilger introduced NIP 65 (now known as the "Outbox Model") with a problem statement in the spirit of the original description of nostr: "Nostr should scale better. People should be able to find what they want."

This approach to relay selection has historically worked "well enough", but it depends on a flawed definition of success. If you only want to find 90% of the content that matches your query, using the top 10 relays will suffice. But nostr is intended to be censorship-resistant. What if those 10 hubs have banned a particular public key? Nostr clients should (at least in theory) be 100% successful in retrieving requested content. Even if someone only posts to their self-hosted relay, you should be able to find their notes if their account is set up properly.

Nostr is a mess. It always has been and will always be. That's part of the appeal! But it's important that users be able to navigate the rolling seas of this highly partition-tolerant network of kaleidoscopically-interwoven people, bots, topics, relays, clients, events, recommendations, lists, feeds, micro-apps, macro-apps, Chinese spam, and "GM"s.

The idea behind the challenge is to see how much we can participate in the network without resorting to it's most accessible form of communication - kind 1 notes (the equivalent of tweets/replies).

Based off history we can easily predict what platforms will do over time. What we cannot predict is what Nostr will do in time, and that's the most exciting part.

Gigi, the bitcoin developer, reminds us that the currency of the modern internet is attention. Today's big apps are harvesting our attention, so the outcome is all the platforms produce car crashes that we can't look away from. But Nostr is integrated with a different currency—bitcoin—so we can build in a different way. "I don't post very much on Nostr," Gigi says. "I keep it simple, usually just posting a good morning and good night message. But people send me bitcoin, and it pays for my breakfast every day."

Source: reason.com

Gigi, the bitcoin developer, reminds us that the currency of the modern internet is attention. Today's big apps are harvesting our attention, so the outcome is all the platforms produce car crashes that we can't look away from. But Nostr is integrated with a different currency—bitcoin—so we can build in a different way. "I don't post very much on Nostr," Gigi says. "I keep it simple, usually just posting a good morning and good night message. But people send me bitcoin, and it pays for my breakfast every day."

Source: reason.com

There are, of course, many other decentralized social network models besides Nostr, primarily coming in "federated" or "Web3" blockchain-based flavors. Mastodon is the most popular platform of the federated variety—the crown jewel of what people are now calling "The Fediverse"—but it is deeply flawed, according to developers like Gigi. "Switching to Mastodon or another federated service doesn't remove King Elon," he explains. "It just creates thousands of King Elons. You need their permission, and you can be deplatformed at any time."

Source: reason.com

Invented by a pseudonymous programmer and overwhelmingly funded by grants from non-profit foundations, this decentralized, free, and open-source protocol has been quietly evolving for the past three years. Like bitcoin, Nostr is a community-run digital network highly resistant to censorship and corruption. It has 40,000 weekly active users and a growing ecosystem of clients and applications ranging from social media to long-form publishing to payments.

Source: reason.com

The problem is centralized control. We can't trust companies to run our primary communications infrastructure. Government regulation only makes matters worse because it creates new legal barriers to entering the industry, which protects incumbent players and stifles innovation.

Source: reason.com

Virtually everyone agrees that social media is broken. On Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok, people fear out-of-control algorithms, fake news, state actor censorship, and propaganda. Google and Meta collect vast troves of personal information on their users and receive hundreds of thousands of requests every year from governments around the world to access that data. YouTube has become arguably "the most powerful media platform in the history of humanity," yet its algorithm is an ever-changing black box to the creators that populate the platform with videos. During the pandemic, federal officials were in contact with every major social media platform, coercing them to remove content.

Source: reason.com

Which brings us squarely back to Mastodon, and Nostr. Both platforms have their own merits. Nostr is about controlling your own content, and what you see, and largely eschews censorship to a high degree. But everyone can see almost everything you do and are talking about, whenever they want. Mastodon, on the other hand, puts the tools into a user's hands to create a network, and build their own communities, while picking and choosing who those communities interact with. A network that ... encourages users to police everyone around them ... which is how we end up with tyrannical admins acting like they work in a prison, and they've just been promoted to Warden.

It feels like they're trying to do Nostr, but be corporate-owned. Bluesky doesn't feel like it's owned by the people, developed by the people, and run by the people. It feels like it's run by some suits, who give the impression that the people will have their freedom, as long as they say it's okay.

That's only half of the issue, though. The other part to all of this, is that the developers I see directly on Bluesky do not recognize or acknowledge this at all. Paul Frazee, whose influence goes back quite a bit further than Bluesky, posts as though it's the greatest platform ever made (maybe just because he's a developer for Bluesky). But the website, despite its six million some-odd users, feels almost completely dead. Which is ridiculous, because, as I've said, Nostr has far less users than that, and it most definitely doesn't feel dead when you post.

But the website, despite its six million some-odd users, feels almost completely dead. Which is ridiculous, because, as I've said, Nostr has far less users than that, and it most definitely doesn't feel dead when you post.

My angst and negative feelings about the direction of Bluesky have nothing to do with the LGBTQ+ community, or any other community residing on the platform. The issues I mainly hold have to do with how far up their own asses the board and developers are, in regard to the platform, and its development over the past year or so. This is why I kind of think of them as the Apple of social media. And you might think, "Hey, don't you own like a billion pieces of Apple tech?"

At this point, I'm less worried about the power consumption of BTC transactions, and have more shifted that focus to content farms from the likes of Microsoft and Nvidia buying up all the AI tech they can get their grubby little hands on.

You take your identity, your thoughts, your posts, and you move freely between pieces of software, and networks, and you lose nothing (this is nearly the direct opposite of Mastodon, where moving to a new server means burning everything you've ever posted, to the ground). And, honestly, I'm kind of starting to feel like that's how it should be. The downside, is that, on Nostr, you have a public key, and a secret key. Your secret key is something you use to log in and sign events coming from your account, and your public key is basically your identity. That's not the iffy part, though. The iffy part, is that people can use your public key to see all of your data except direct messages (which are encrypted).

On the topic of decentralization, which is something I feel is integral to the future of the internet, I now understand Mastodon to be a place of islands, and decentralization that occurs in a way that's more like isolated communities talking to other isolated communities. Like the latter half of The Walking Dead.

This inspired me to log back in, and set some things up (such as domain verification from one of a few domains I own), and then I explored a bit. I interacted with people, participated in some community events that came up spontaneously, and really dug into the extreme multitude of features that run across the Nostr network.

I recently wrote about Nostr, and its relayed protocol of user-owned identity that you can take ... wherever. I outlined a lot of thoughts and impressions I initially had, and then what I wrote went to Reddit, and then it found itself on Nostr. It got there entirely outside my own involvement. I posted to Mastodon, and almost nowhere else.

Due to its decentralized nature, Nostr allows information to be interoperable between applications. This means users can use different social media apps and still access the same content. A key advantage of this design is that no single application owns user data. If users want to switch apps, they can transfer all their data to a new one.

Source: river.com

Nostr is based on a simple design. Messages are exchanged between clients (apps) and relays. A relay, akin to a Bitcoin node, acts as a basic server that stores and broadcasts published content. Anyone can host a relay, and users can choose to follow or ignore any relay. Relays can set their own rules and policies for the information they broadcast. The glue that holds this system together is the Nostr protocol, defining how messages are sent and fetched across the network.

Source: river.com

To conclude: Nostr is like the internet (or the internet of some decades ago): a little chaotic, but very open. It is better than the internet because it is structured and actions can be automated, but, like in the internet itself, nothing is guaranteed to work at all times and users many have to do some manual work from time to time to fix things. Plus, there is the cryptographic key stuff, which is painful, but cool.

Source: fiatjaf.com

What lies before us may be a “clown world” but hope is far from lost. We’ve been here before. Many times, and against greater odds. This is our generation’s opportunity for a re-conquista. 

[Laughs] I don't know. Over... at least a million. I do think it hits that number and goes beyond. But I think the price is only interesting... The most amazing thing about Bitcoin, apart from the founding story, is anyone who works on it, or gets paid in it, or buys it for themselves — everyone who puts any effort in to make it better — is making the entire ecosystem better, which makes the price go up. It's a fascinating ecosystem and movement, more than anything else. It taught me a lot.

Source: www.piratewires.com

I hate to sound like a broken record, but one of the beauties of Nostr is you have these public-private key pairs, so it confirms identity. I think a confirmed identity that you own, that is not given to you by a government or corporation, that you truly own, is the way through this, because you can verify authenticity.

Source: www.piratewires.com

It is sad, but it created something different in contrast to Twitter, which is Nostr, and that is something I believe in. I know it's early, and Nostr is weird and hard to use, but if you truly believe in censorship resistance and free speech, you have to use the technologies that actually enable that, and defend your rights. I find it interesting to watch people who say they believe in these things, but aren't invested in learning about Bitcoin or something like Nostr. Because those are technologies no company or government can compromise in any way. But corporations can be compromised. And they have been.

Source: www.piratewires.com

Yeah, and we had an activist come in, by the way. And he sat on our board for a year and a half. We didn't have dual-class voting shares, we had no defense whatsoever. So my only path out that I could see was: we have to be on a protocol that we can't remove content from. We have to move away from this dependency on brand advertisement. We were moving into commerce, direct response, and payments. You can see all those experiments were going on before the company was sold. And we must move to a position where our policies are actually matching the fact that from a technology standpoint, we can't take the same actions that we did in the past, pure and simple.

Source: www.piratewires.com

Well, I put that post on both Nostr and Twitter. And the reference of, "you're on one," it refers to different things based on where you read it.

Source: www.piratewires.com